Bluebeard (5 page)

And if I had missed the warning signals on the beach, there were plenty more at supper. She behaved as though she were a paying customer in a fancy restaurant, screwing up her face after tasting a wine which I myself had sipped and declared potable, and declaring the veal to be overcooked and ordering Slazinger to send his serving back to the kitchen along with hers, and saying that she was going to plan the meals while she was here, since Paul’s and my circulatory systems were obviously, since our complexions were so pasty and our gestures so listless, clogged up with cholesterol.

She was outrageous! She sat across from a Jackson Pollock for which I had just been offered two million dollars by an anonymous collector in Switzerland, and she said, “I wouldn’t give that houseroom!”

So I asked her tartly, after a wink in Slazinger’s direction, what sort of picture might please her more.

She replied that she wasn’t on Earth to be pleased but to be instructed. “I need information the way I need vitamins and minerals,” she said. “Judging from your pictures, you hate facts like poison.”

“I suppose you would be happier looking at George Washington crossing the Delaware,” I said.

“Who wouldn’t?” she said. “But I tell you what I’d really like to see there since our talk on the beach.”

“Which is—?” I said, arching my eyebrows and then winking at Slazinger again.

“I’d like a picture with some grass and dirt at the bottom,” she said.

“Brown and green,” I suggested.

“Fine,” she said. “And sky at the top.”

“Blue,” I said.

“Maybe with clouds,” she said.

“Easily supplied,” I said.

“And in between the sky and the ground—” she said.

“A duck?” I said. “An organ-grinder with his monkey? A sailor and his girl on a park bench?”

“Not a duck and not an organ-grinder and not a
sailor and his girl,” she said. “A whole lot of dead bodies lying every which way on the ground. And very close to us is the face of a beautiful girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen. She is pinned under the corpse of a man, but she is still alive, and she is staring into the open mouth of a dead old woman whose face is only inches from hers. Out of that toothless mouth are spilling diamonds and emeralds and rubies.”

There was a silence.

And then she said, “You could build a whole new religion, and a much needed one, too, on a picture like that.” She nodded in the direction of the Pollock. “All anybody could do with a picture like that is illustrate an advertisement for a hangover remedy or seasick pills.”

Slazinger asked her what had brought her to the Hamptons, since she didn’t know anybody here. She replied that she hoped to find some peace and quiet so she could devote her full attention to writing a biography of her husband, the Baltimore brain surgeon.

Slazinger preened himself as a man who had published eleven novels and he patronized her as an amateur.

“Everybody thinks he or she can be a writer,” he said with airy irony.

“Don’t tell me it’s a crime to try,” she said.

“It’s a crime to think it’s easy,” he said. “But if you’re really serious, you’ll find out quick enough that it’s the hardest thing there is.”

“Particularly so, if you have absolutely nothing to
say,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s the main reason people find it so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn’t that the
only
reason they find writing hard: they don’t know or care about anything?”

Here Slazinger stole a line from the writer Truman Capote, who died five years ago, and who had a house only a few miles west of here. “I think you’re talking about
typing
instead
of writing,”
he said.

She promptly identified the source of his witticism: “Truman Capote,” she said.

Slazinger covered himself nicely. “As everyone knows,” he said.

“If you didn’t have such a kind face,” she said, “I would suspect that you were making fun of me.”

But listen to this, which she only told me at breakfast this morning. Just listen to this and then tell me who was toying with whom at that supper, which is now two weeks ago: Mrs. Berman is
not
an amateur writing a biography of her late husband. That was just a story to cover her true identity and purpose for being here. She swore me to secrecy, and then confessed that she was really in the Hamptons to research and write a novel about working-class adolescents living in a resort community teeming in the summer time with the sons and daughters of multimillionaires.

And this wasn’t going to be her first novel either. It would be the twenty-first in a series of shockingly frank and enormously popular novels for young readers, several
of which had been made into motion pictures. She had written them under the name of “Polly Madison.”

I certainly
will
keep this a secret, too, if only to save the life of Paul Slazinger. If he finds out who she really is now, after all his posturing as a professional writer, he will do what Terry Kitchen, the only other best friend I ever had, did. He will commit suicide.

In terms of commercial importance in the literary marketplace, Circe Berman is to Paul Slazinger what General Motors is to a bicycle factory in Albania!

Mum’s the word!

She said that first night that she collected pictures, too.

I asked her what kind, and she said, “Victorian chromos of little girls on swings.” She said she had more than a hundred of them, all different, but all of little girls on swings.

“I suppose you think that’s terrible,” she said.

“Not at all,” I said, “just as long as you keep them safely caged in Baltimore.”

That first night, I remember, too, she asked Slazinger and me, and then the cook and her daughter, too, if we knew any true stories about local girls from relatively
poor families who had married the sons of rich people.

Slazinger said, “I don’t think you’ll even see that in the
movies
anymore.”

Celeste told her, “The rich marry the rich. Where have you
been
all your life?”

To get back to the past, which is what this book is supposed to be all about: My mother gathered up the jewels that had fallen from the dead woman’s mouth, but not the ones still inside there. Whenever she told the story, she was emphatic about that: she hadn’t fished anything from the woman’s mouth. Whatever had stayed in there was still the woman’s very personal property.

And Mother crawled away after nightfall, after the killers had all gone home. She wasn’t from my father’s village, and she would not meet him until they both crossed the lightly guarded border with Persia, about seventy miles from the scene of the massacre.

Persian Armenians took them in. After they decided to go together to Egypt. My father did most of the talking, since Mother had a mouthful of jewels. When they got to the Persian Gulf, mother sold the first of those compact treasures in order to buy them passage on a small freighter to Cairo, via the Red Sea. And it was in Cairo that they met the criminal Vartan Mamigonian, a survivor of an earlier massacre.

“Never trust a survivor,” my father used to warn
me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, “until you find out what he did to stay alive.”